Conventional production environments are organized in a fashion that is functionally independent of job complexity, job mix, and total volume of jobs. Methods of partitioning a manufacturing environment into cells are known, and typically, related production equipment is grouped together. In other words, conventional production environments organize resources into separate departments, where each department corresponds to a type of process or operation that is performed to complete a job.
When a job arrives from a customer, the job sequentially passes through each department. Once the job is completely processed by a first department, the job gets queued for the next department. This approach continues until the job is completed. Unfortunately, this conventional approach leads to significant time delays and increased work-in-progress and inventory costs.